


You Smile; No, It Is Not Fatal

by stella_bella



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bloodplay, M/M, Post Hell, Torture, post series 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 20:31:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1360786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stella_bella/pseuds/stella_bella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam pulls Dean out of Hell after the Season 3 finale, but neither of them are the same.  Takes place after "Is This Love Then, This Red Material" but it's not necessary to read them both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Smile; No, It Is Not Fatal

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the poem "The Other" by Sylvia Plath. Yet another oldie-but-moldy that I found and fixed up to something resembling decency. Feedback is appreciated, as always.

This is what happens when you go to Hell.

There is pain, except that calling it that is like calling the universe big. It’s just a word, and the reality is so much more.

There is torture, but again that’s not really accurate. Torture implies the infliction of pain, which brings everything right back to the beginning. There are no rules or boundaries or natural order in Hell; no constraints, no required adherence to Newtonian or Einsteinian physics. Everything is open and raw and creative, and most go completely insane in a matter of weeks. Most. Some push past the revulsion and get curious.

And it’s not always who you think it would be. The dictators and politicians and the gangs are big talkers, sure, but in general they’ve got no stomach for the action. Sometimes no stomach, period. Too many years of paying others to do the dirty work, when in Hell, everyone is equal. Equally fucked.

It’s much easier with a peasant, or a laborer, or even a cog in the great cubicle farm. Lots of pent-up rage in the paper-pushers.

It’s really easy with people who hurt for a living: prison guards and soldiers and butchers. Or hunters. Hunters are good.

This is what happens when you come back.

You don’t.

\---

Dean went to Hell, and Sam went after him.

Down and down the rabbit hole, and it’s a good thing poor Alice never found this particular one. She’d have been sick all over that pretty white apron.

_Drink me, and she shrunk so small, but there was no way out and she couldn’t remember why she’d come in the first place. Eat me, and she grew so tall, with a smile ghostly in the darkness, and her hands scraped a new door, except it wasn’t quite large enough, and she had to leave a few bits behind. Nothing that would be missed. Though the White Rabbit did fret when he saw all that blood on his nice tile floor, and the ragged fingernails stuck in the wainscoting._

Dean crawled out of Hell, dragging Sam after him.

Except they weren’t.

\---

They hid for a week in a cabin up north, somewhere with lots of pine trees and hand-pumped well water that tasted faintly metallic.

The lake was blue in the sunlight, and cold with the memory of a thousand winters. Sam stood on the shore, digging his feet into sand tinted brown with leaf decay. He squinted across for hours, straight and still. The sun went down, eclipsed behind the shadowed pine trees on the other side.

Dean wandered out, banging the screen door and swatting ineffectually at mosquitoes. Come on, Sam. You’re scaring the fish.

There’s no fish, Dean.

‘Course there’s fish. It’s a lake, dumbass. That’s a rule.

Sam turned, untucking his hands from his armpits. He held them out, palms up, and in the twilight the cuts looked black.

Dean stopped walking, a couple feet away, and they stared at each other. Two silhouettes on a beach, in Michigan, in late summer. There were stars in an inky sky, and fireflies, and the water reflected the dark above and the long black fingers of trees, edged by the last faint streaks of color left in the world.

Somewhere, someone was probably falling in love, kissing someone else under those trees and smelling suntan lotion and skin-so-soft, tangling tanned fingers in sun-bleached hair and wondering if sex on the beach was as good a drink as everyone made it out to be.

Somewhere someone was probably laughing.

Here, though, someone went to his knees on a bed of pine needles, and someone else licked blood droplets off of his hands, like a cat.

_Oh, you can’t help that - we’re all mad here. And the whole rest of the Cat disappeared, except for his smile, which was red and shone wetly. If you go this way, you’ll meet a priest. And if you go that way, you’ll meet a senator. Lovely people, bit mad though. Of course, it’s hard to be anything else when you’ve got nothing for tea but your own warm intestines. Biscuit?_

Somewhere, someone was screaming, but a lake in Michigan might as well be the moon. No one heard anything, at least not anyone that cared.

Shit, Sammy, don’t fucking kiss me with that mouth. You’ve got blood in your teeth.

You didn’t care earlier.

Yeah, but that was your blood. ‘S different.

Sam spat into the leaves, still smelling coconut suntan lotion underneath the sickly scent of decay. When he reached out, calloused hands batted him away, and when he lunged, Dean knocked his feet out from under him. They tussled on the sand for a bit, rolling through wads of sticky needles. It ended when Dean sighed and gave in, planting his feet and flipping them over.

Sam’s eyes glittered in the half-light, and his breath came short. Dean pulled his second-stringer knife from his boot and flicked it open, felt Sam tense underneath him as he sliced open his arm, white teeth in the dark as Sam licked his lips, fingers digging into Dean’s hip. Dean grinned as he watched the blood ooze black in the darkness, as he smeared it into Sam’s mouth. The grin melted, darkened, eyes closing and breath quickening as Sam drank for a few moments, big hands wrapped over and around, and Dean could smell blood and arousal, running his other hand through Sam’s tangled hair, feeling him arch into it, feeling the rasp of his tongue on tender inner-arm flesh, feeling his own heart pound an answer.

This time he let Sam kiss him.

\---

Bobby was asleep when the phone rang.

Not one of the various working phones - the ones labeled FBI and POLICE and HOMELAND SECURITY with peeling masking tape. His real phone, the only one whose voicemail had his name.

There were exactly half-a-dozen people in the whole big blue world that knew this number. Four of them were dead, one of them was too damn proud to call for anything except maybe the actual Apocalypse, and the other hated his guts after that one job in Nebraska years back.

Bobby rolled over and scrubbed a hand over his face, the other reaching blindly for his night table.

He fumbled the phone trying to get it open, and it stopped ringing as the caller got kicked over to voicemail. He sat, blinking and coming up empty on a fitting description for what he was going to do to this stupid bastard when he finally got a hold of him, which really was saying something because Bobby could read about a dozen languages and swear in three more. He was glaring at the cell when it started ringing again.

_Blocked number_

He hesitated, head feeling like an engine left idle all winter, stiff and reluctant to start. And then the instincts kicked in, the ones that said, Could be Rufus ran into something that finally made him see sense, or maybe something happened to Jo and Ellen needs backup.

Bobby flipped open the phone and held it up. Silence.

…Hello?

There was silence.

And then there wasn’t. It sounded far away, and muffled, but after a second Bobby knew he was listening to police sirens, interspersed with the warning horn of a fire truck.

Hello?

There was a rustling, and then he heard breathing, quick and unsteady.

This Bobby? Bobby Singer?

Who’s asking?

The voice didn’t sound like anyone he knew, certainly not anyone who should have gotten their hands on this number. It did sound all sorts of freaked-out and confused, though.

My name’s Anders, I’m a-- I’m a hunter, friend of Jo’s. She, uh, gave me this number for emergencies.

That so.

There was a pause, the kid obviously taken aback. Bobby gritted his teeth. Revised his earlier calculations by plus two and then spared a thought for changing his digits. He loved Jo, and Ellen too, loved them like family, but while family may not end with blood, it certainly doesn’t extend to every single person in the fucking country.

Um, listen, I’m in Wyoming, uh, just across the border from South Dakota. There’s, uh, there’s something going on here and I don’t know what--

The voice cut off, and all Bobby could hear was wind moving across the phone’s sound pickup.

…Kid? Anders? You there?

He came back on in a rush.

Yeah, yeah. Listen, I was tracking this witch, and she--

More muffled sounds.

\--she was holed up in a residential neighborhood--

It sounded like Anders was running, talking into the phone between gasps for breath.

\--I was gonna take care of her, but when I got there the whole house--

Bobby waited out the silence.

\--the whole fucking house, just burning to the ground--

He heard the sirens again, still distinctive but now getting farther away.

\--all these people just standing in the streets, said the whole block would’ve gone up if it hadn’t been raining so hard lately--

Now that he knew what to listen for, Bobby could also hear a low-level white noise, the _shush_ of car tires through puddles.

\--I asked around, called Jo, but no one else was here, no one was supposed to be here--

Bobby heard a sharp exhale and a swallow.

\--I mean, they killed the witch but they nearly killed a whole lot of civilians too, and I didn’t know--

Another choked gasp.

\--didn’t know if this was something else supernatural, like higher on the food chain, like she’d been harnessing a demon or something and it slipped the bindings--

\--or--

\--or something else but I didn’t know who to call--

Bobby was sitting upright in bed, sleep forgotten despite the early hour and the pre-dawn darkness.

Listen to me Anders. Anders?

…Yeah?

Why’d you say _them?_

What?

Them. You said _them._ Why?

Oh, uh, I was talking to this lady who lives across the street--

There was the sound of a large vehicle passing close by, its rumble almost too low for the phone’s speakers.

\--said they were just standing outside the house, watching it burn. Said there were two of them.

Two of what? What’d they look like? Did they phase in and out like ghosts or was there sulfur or black smoke?

Bobby started running through his mental supernatural rolodex, flipping through the calling cards of the bad, the real bad, and the fuckin' ugly.  It took him a minute to realize that Anders was still talking.

\--nothing like that, I asked. She was scared, really scared, but she said they were just guys, just two guys. One of them was real tall.

How’d she know they were just guys? Lot of things look like just guys.

She said they got into a car, had it parked on the side street by her house. How many monsters do you know that drive cars?

He sounded faintly incredulous.

That changed things. In a good way, a not-his-problem way. Bobby grunted his agreement, letting his spine relax against the thin pillows. He was tired again, the last gasps of adrenaline fading as the dawn broke. He yawned, holding the phone away, and then cleared his throat.

Listen, Anders. I think this might be a case for the FBI. You should tell the police on-scene what that lady told you; might be an arsonist, have nothing to do with us.

Bobby ran a hand through his thinning hair, scratched at his beard.

\--funny thing is, that’s what I thought, so I called Jo and she said to call you. Didn’t say why, just said, Call Bobby.

Why me? I’m good, but I ain’t exactly a specialist in people-crazy.

I don’t know, I just told her what the lady said, told her that they got into a black car parked on the side street, older model Chevrolet Impala. I asked was she sure, but she said her late husband used to own one just like it, waxed it every Sunday. Said it was a ‘66 or ‘67, couldn’t tell for sure because the light was bad, streetlights out, you know--

Bobby froze.

…Hello? Mr. Singer?

_Come, we shall have some fun now! And Alice was glad, for she was very good at guessing riddles. And the March Hare smiled and said, why is a ribcage like a razor-blade, except she didn’t know the answer to that. So she ate her red red jam on toast and drank her tea while the others looked for the Dormouse, and failing to discover where he had got to, started an argument about tea-trays. And Alice licked up the droplets of cream from her dish and ate the toast and looked entirely satisfied._

Anders finally hung up the phone, standing under the awning of a coffee-shop downtown. He tried calling back, but it just went straight to voicemail.

Eventually, he gave up, and shivered in his coat until the barista unlocked the door and let him in with the early morning commuter rush. He drank an extra-hot double-shot venti latte and watched the rain fall, and thought about his girlfriend in Atlantic City.

Her name was Carla and she had a fluffy white maltese named Pinky. He was dialing her number as he stepped back out into the drizzle, walking east and heading for the lot where he’d parked the rental car.

She answered on the fourth ring, and she told him to swing by anytime.

Less than three hundred miles away, Bobby sat in his bed until the sunrise made the dusty curtains glow. He revised his earlier recalculation. Exactly eight people, seven that he gave a shit about, one of them a goddamn blabbermouth, one as stubborn as her unfortunately deceased husband, the other still obviously pissed, two of them dead about the same time, and two of them--

Two of them what?

\---

The rising sun lit up the interior of a black car, parked on the side of the road at a scenic overlook.

There was a neat bullet hole through the sign that said NO PARKING OVERNIGHT, right through the second O. Dean had been proud of his drunken accuracy, twenty meters away and in the dark, balanced on the Impala’s fender, but Sam wouldn’t let him enjoy it, harping on about public property and the waste of government funds and reckless endangerment of innocent signposts, though his tirade was cut short when he gestured too expansively and fell off the trunk.

Dean just laughed until he fell over too.

Right now they were curled together in the back seat, in defiance of societal norms, the outdated 1950s-era small-town public decency regulations, and the laws of physics.

They currently did not give a shit about any of those.

Sam stirred, shifting his head where it was resting on Dean’s chest and tightening his arm. Dean shifted back, a sleepy grumble as he turned his nose into Sam’s hair and inhaled.

The sun rose higher, pink light brightening to gold.

Dean opened his eyes, then immediately shut them and groaned. Sam turned his face into Dean’s shoulder and squinched his eyes shut. Dean worked a hand free and rubbed his eyes, tipping his head back until the tips of his hair brushed the door handle.

‘S too damn early.

Mmm.

Fucking sun.

Mmm hmm.

Goddammit.

Sam didn’t lift his head, but his voice definitely carried an edge.

Dean if you don’t shut up I swear to god--

Yeah? What’re you gonna do, punk?

The next few moments involved a selection of carefully-chosen swears, a whack on the back of a head, and a brief but enthusiastic - if slightly unbalanced - wrestling match. They ended with Dean on top of Sam, still in the backseat, fully awake with a devious grin and an award-winning case of bedhead. The moments after those involved more swearing, more desperate hair-gripping, and Sam whacking his head on the door hard enough to cause a goose egg.

He didn’t particularly give a shit.

_Well, well - everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it. And she squeezed herself closer to Alice’s side, slow burning grin that never reached those black eyes. Alice did not much like her keeping so close: first, because demons tend to be very ugly, especially in Hell, and secondly, because she was exactly the right height to bite little strips of flesh off of Alice’s neck, and the blood running down the back of her dress made Alice feel a bit cross. However, she did not like to be rude, so she bore it as well as she could. The game’s going on rather better now, said Alice, as she sidestepped someone’s ashen remains. ‘Tis so, said the Demon, and the moral of that is -- Oh, ‘tis love, ‘tis love, that makes the world go round!_

\---

Police Chief Steve Dutton was still eating breakfast when he got the call. Something about vandalism out on the stretch of highway east of the bridge.

He left his eggs and toast somewhat regretfully, thinking of punk-ass kids and all the things he would like to do to them. Jail wasn’t good enough, not for those like Barney Cribbens, whose dad was an abusive neglectful alcoholic ugly-ass son of a bitch with a temper wider than the entire state. Nobody’d ever proven that Barney was the one who lit up Milton’s haystacks a few years back, but then again nobody really had to prove anything to know. He’d walked around town smugger than the cat that ate the canary for two whole weeks, and the department couldn’t touch him.

He was enjoying a pleasant image of what his own father would have done to such a destructive, self-centered little bastard, when his car found the turn-off and he pulled over.

At first, he couldn’t see anything wrong. Morning sunlight lit up the trees and the dusty grass along the wooden railing, and insects made _brrzzzt brrzzt_ sounds in the distance.

He made a slow circuit, hand on his holster, just in case. A fine dust rose up and settled over his polished shoes.

When he turned again, he noticed the sign. He’d had it put up himself a few years ago, when teenagers used to drive out here and park and get up to unchristian behavior. He was proud of it, the clean white metal and the bold red letters his contribution to society at large.

Now it looked like a cheese grater. Someone had taken a gun and shot a round hole through each letter. Through each one, he saw Barney’s mocking grin.

Steve felt the first rumbles of indigestion.

And then he saw the body.

The sun slowly brightened, until the sky was a deep, aching sapphire, and Steve had left two black tracks on the blue-grey pavement in his haste to get back to the station. He’d put out the call, taking three tries to find the right button, and he wasn’t sure anyone had believed him.

Halfway back, he pulled over with a screech, barely getting his head out of the car before he was throwing up everything in his stomach. He wiped his mouth and panted, seeing a neat pile of intestines instead of half-digested eggs and bacon. He retched again, and closed his eyes.

Even then, he saw the body, gutted and naked, nailed to the concrete in some sort of circle, right underneath the sign that proclaimed SCENIC OVERLOOK.

There were flies in the jagged edges of the gaping abdominal wounds, and ants in his empty eyes, but Steve knew old man Cribbens when he saw him.

Nine miles down the road in the other direction, Sam paid Dean back for earlier, and nearly made him crash the car in the process.

Dean almost didn’t mind.

\---

Bobby was heating up leftover chili on the stove when the call came in.

This time it was his other other phone, the one that about twenty-three people kept the number for. Good hunters, all of them, and good people. He knew them personally, had clapped a hand on their back in congratulations or ordered them another round at one time or another. Even if he hadn’t seen a few of them in a while, long enough to forget whether Dave McCullum had the ginger beard or if that was his cousin Lefty, he still counted them as friends.

He had a bad feeling even before he plucked the phone out of its black plastic cradle.

Heya Bobby. It’s Joe.

Joe. How ya been.

Small talk, and he stirred the pot with the nicked wooden spoon while Joe hemmed and hawed and finally got down to it.

I been up in Montana for a job, just a reg’lar salt ‘n burn, and I heard some things.

Yeah? Another hunt?

The slightest hesitation. Bobby shifted the phone between his ear and his shoulder, freeing up a calloused hand to dig through the cabinets for the cooking salt.

Not, uh, not quite. Listen, Bobby. I, uh, I don’t like this and I know it ain’t none of my business, but I figure if ya gotta hear it from someone, should be someone ya know.

Uh huh.

Salt wasn’t in the cabinet, and Bobby thunked his hand down on the edge in annoyance, trying to remember where he’d left it.

You know I wouldn’t call ‘less it was important, and, uh, I been hearing things that I can’t ignore, and I know other hunters won’t neither.

Bobby gave up digging for the damned salt cylinder and put the spoon on the countertop a little more firmly than strictly necessary. He nudged the phone back into his hand and blew out a breath.

Quit pussy-footin’ around, Joe. What’s goin’ on.

I heard some talk about some hunters.

There’s always talk about hunters. Worse than teenage girls for gossip.

Figures that he’d know where the rock salt was, hidden stashes in every room and lines of it built into the damn floors, but that cooking salt could just slip his mind like it was cursed or something.

Yeah, but this is different. I been hearing things--

Joe, you keep sayin’ that. I’m glad to know you ain’t deaf yet, but spit it out.

Three diff’rent states, now, Bobby. Three states, and ever’ time I go into a bar, someone brings up the same two guys. Always two, and one of ‘em real tall, and both of ‘em-- both of ‘em _wrong._

A nervous laugh.

It’s not, ‘s not like we’ve got a problem with people hunting things in different ways, Bobby, it’s jest that, as a general fact, hunters don’t burn down the whole damned cemetery when they light up a body. They don’t start bar fights that leave three men in the hospital and the others scared to talk. And they don’t take on shit that could level half the state without backup and then go on and level half the state anyway.

Bobby leaned on the counter and set his jaw.

Get to the point, Joe.

Okay, okay, listen. Three separate times, I heard tell ‘bout these two guys, show up, wreck the place, and drive off in a big black car. An’ I know, I know I ain’t never seen ‘em personally, an’ I know you don’t wanna hear this, and I feel like an ass for even bringin’ it up, but that’s three different hunters sayin’ that the two loose cannons are the Winchester boys and I can’t ignore it anymore.

A long silence. Bobby finally clears his throat.

Sam and Dean are dead.

Bobby clears his throat again.

I know, Bobby. I know.

No, you don’t. You ain’t got the foggiest.

Maybe not. But listen, Bobby. This ain’t gonna go away just ‘cause you don’t like it. If it ain’t them, then it’s somethin’ wearin’ ‘em, and that’s six-and-a-half-dozen right there. I’m tellin’ ya ‘cause you’re a friend, an’ a damn good hunter, smarter than most, an’ I want you to know, that if you keep on buryin’ your head in the sand, someone’s gonna get it in _their_ head that these boys is more trouble than they’re worth.

What exactly are you tellin’ me, Joe.

I’m tellin’ ya that if you don’t figure out what the hell is goin’ on here, someone’s gonna do it for ya, an’ you’re not gonna like it.

The stink of burning chili finally penetrates, and Bobby flings himself sideways to turn off the burner and dump the pot into the sink.

It that a threat, Joe?

The cold water raises a face-full of steam, and bits of blackened meat and beans rise to the surface.

It’s a fact, Bobby. And if there is something goin’ on, if it is those boys, then you should be the one-- You should be the one to take care of it. You owe ‘em that.

Bobby hangs up the phone and stares at it for a long time. It never rains but it pours. Eventually, he turns off the water and leaves the soggy remains of an unwanted lunch behind.

He shuffles into the study and pours himself a shot of whiskey. Sees the ghost of a smile and glint of green eyes, Gee, Bobby, breaking out the good stuff for us, and a snort, more fondness than irritation, Maybe he actually would if you ever did anything but eat his food and take up space here.

He stares at the faded red wall across from the desk, watching shadows from the past. He sees them, a brief struggle as one takes a swipe at the other, and the other shoulder-checks him right back; he watches them pass through the chipped doorframe, jostling to be first, and arguing about who exactly takes up more space. Their laughter fades into the dust motes swirling in beams of late afternoon sun, and Bobby realizes he’s drunk half the bottle.

He puts it back and stares some more, until the light fades and evening darkens the room and washes all of the color out.

_Once, says the Mock Turtle, I was a real turtle. When we were little, we went to school and we learned all sorts of tasty things. How to kill, and how to stalk, and how to tell a lie. But of course our smiles were bright, and the dark things rolled off of us like the sea. We learned the different branches of Hunting -- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. But then we knew it all and more, and we searched high and low, but always farther on and further down until we found the Classical master to teach us new things. He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say. But we called it Life and Death, Pain and Truth, Blood and Bonding, and then the tide did at last come in and it swallowed us up._

\---

Bobby finally moves from his chair when the twilight is halfway between light and dark, making things look far away and up close at the same time, blurs the edges together.

He finds a phone, and a cheap leather address book, and draws his finger along the dust-furred edges of the pages while he listens to the ringing.

Far away, a voice answers.

Bobby Singer. I was expecting you to call. Sooner though; you can sure be a stubborn ass when you want.

He hears the amusement in her voice, rasp of a thousand rock concerts and a thousand more cigarettes dipped in whiskey.

Hey, Pamela. Guess you know why I called then.

He feels more than hears the warmth drain out of her, pictures her slumped at a kitchen table, cigarette smoke trailing upwards into the cone of a single lampshade. Closes his eyes and wonders if she’s doing the same, or just studying the worn scratches in the table like they will tell her something different.

Reckon I do.

He savors the silence before she speaks, while he can still pretend.

\---

Bobby finally catches up with them in Wisconsin. It’s an accident.

After what Pamela told him over the phone, he hasn’t done anything. This was just following up on a lead for a rare grimoire. A contact had told him that it was coming up for auction; a genuine fourteenth century hand-lettered tome with gilt-edged pages and a whole lot of darkness between the leather covers. He drove to the current owner’s house to get a look-see, and maybe to offer a little persuasion when it came to choosing a buyer.

He felt like the guy got him.

It was on his way back, taking side roads to avoid a traffic snarl on the freeway; late November is a bitch of a time to be going anywhere. Squinting ahead, trying to pick out the street sign at the lonely intersection, is when he spotted it.

He stops at the hill, letting the truck idle and no longer trying to decide if he should go north on Baywood or take the more easterly fork of Gammon Farm in order to get back to the center of what passes for a town out here. The sky is almost dark, smear of burnt red-orange low on the horizon, glowing through the thin black trees. To the east, smoke ascends with a whirl of sparks, and he knows.

He doesn’t know how, but he does.

Bobby turns the truck slowly, winding along rutted roads more appropriate for cattle than modern vehicles, until he can smell the tang of wood smoke through the heater. He shuts off the headlights and lets the truck coast to a stop.

The cold is a shock; more so than the fire smell, like a hundred leaf fires at once, memories of autumns long gone and much happier. He coughs and shoves his hands into his pockets, hunches his shoulders against the biting wind, and walks.

Brambles tug at his sleeves, and he hears a distant crash, a roof or a wall, maybe, and an answering yell.

The thick trees make it hard to see much, but the bright orange-yellow light is stronger, dancing along the trunks and painting the edges of the branches gold.

He comes out of the woods on the north side of the field, staying in the sheltering darkness of the trees. It’s how you act on a hunt when you don’t know what you’re getting into, when you’re there to observe and catalogue and learn about the enemy.

The warmth of the fire leaves him cold.

It’s an abandoned farm, that much is clear. The weeds in the field will be waist-high in the summer; vines and brambles mixing with wheat gone wild. Now they’re flattened into uneven lumps, frozen to the unplowed earth.

The barn is burning.

Flames glow orange and red and yellow and a thousand colors in between, too bright to look at but too mesmerizing to look away. The structure is a coal-black interruption, spaces between the boards growing larger every minute. The fire burns hot and high, reaching up into the winter sky, and even the clear white stars are invisible.

Something crashes, definitely the roof this time, and a whirl of sparks flies upwards, glowing like red demon eyes.

There are two figures in the lower end of the field, too close to the inferno. They stand together, a silhouette, and Bobby can’t see where one ends and the other begins.

He stays for a while, until the fire loses its urgency, curls back inwards to finish the job. He doesn’t remember walking back to the truck.

_Let the jury consider their verdict, the King said. No, no, said the Queen, Sentence first -- verdict afterwards. Which is just silly, especially when the jury bleeds so easily, folding over soft cores and crying out unintelligibly. Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time) picked up her knife and cowed the King. Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of wolves! And so saying, she ran off laughing, wiping the blade on her skirt and singing all the way._

It takes a couple minutes and a couple more furtive swallows from his emergency flask before Bobby can get his hands to remember how to turn the key in the ignition, how to hold the wheel. He turns the heater on full blast, shivering, and tells himself it’s just the cold. Goddamn Wisconsin ball-freezer of a winter.

He makes it home in two days or so, never stopping for long but never driving much over the limit either. It’s another two weeks before he calls Pamela again. Of course she’s expecting him.

I saw ‘em.

He notes the lack of any emotion in his voice, like he’s reading from one of his books something that someone else saw, something remote and untouchable now.

Do you believe me?

Yeah.

He has to stop, and swallow down the bile that rises.

It’s-- it’s _them_ , all right. Couldn’t be anything but. But it’s _not_ them either.

They went to Hell, Bobby.

Pam sounds faintly, darkly amused. He hears the clink of ice cubes in a glass.

I know, but--

Bobby.

The glass is set down, a _chunk_  audible over the phone lines like a slap to the face.

Bobby, listen. How many brothers you know would sell their souls for each other? This is them, just-- darker. They were always this broken, except now they’ve got nothing left to hide it.

He hears a swallow, an exhale.

I once read that war is where men burn the fat off their souls. I’d venture to say that Hell goes pretty much the same way.

Bobby can’t think of a single thing to say.

You believe me, though, don’t you. They won’t hurt anyone that don’t got it coming.

That’s a pretty ambiguous field right there, Pamela.

Let it go, Bobby. They may not be your boys anymore, but they sure as hell are each others’, and that’s all that matters. Between the both of them they got just about enough humanity left for one. Don’t go messing with that. Let them be.

Bobby can feel the anger, the frustration rising; not necessarily towards them, but towards the world and the circumstances that pushed them this far. Caleb and his speeches about family and sacrifice and Pastor Jim with his lectures on the sanctity of life. The demon for fucking up any chance they had at normal and John for doing the rest.

He feels his hand gripping the edge of the desk hard enough to dig in splinters, and forces himself to relax.

Bobby, I can hear you thinking over there. Don’t have to be psychic to guess what about. Stop it. Let them be. You burned your boys, salted and burned and buried and mourned. Let it stay that way. These’re not your boys.

Long after midnight, he lies awake and remembers. He doesn’t cry, because he’s Bobby goddamn Singer, a hunter and a man and the fucking hammer of god. He remembers, and then he forgets, and he tells himself that nothing’s changed.

Sam and Dean Winchester died in 2008, and are buried in the woods out back, near the creek.

\---

Some guy in a bar outside of Plunkett’s Creek tries to throw Sam out for hustling pool.

Dean shoots him through the stomach, and tackles Sam over the pool table. The worn green felt creates a nice counterpoint to Sam’s miles of tanned skin, and his desperate delicious pleading nearly drowns out the guy’s death rattle. Which is good, since Dean doesn’t want to have to kill the fucker again.

Dean nips kisses up Sam’s chest, over his collarbone and throat, and when he finally licks into his mouth, he can’t hear anything but the rush of blood in his chest and Sam’s. The kiss tastes of cheap beer and not-so-cheap whiskey and blood.

Sam arches off of the table, hands frantic and Dean just smiles dark and heated, sucks a bruise into Sam’s neck and closes his eyes. The silver blade glints under the low-hanging lamps, and Sam’s blood is sweeter than his own. He gets Sam’s knees up, wraps his arms around, and the long slide in feels like falling. Sam catches him, winds his long fingers in the leather cord around Dean’s neck and pulls him down and in, until they’re breathing into each other’s mouths and Sam is meeting every thrust with a vengeance, head thrown back and panting, sweat like blood on his neck and blood like redemption, and Dean takes it all, takes it and gives it back until he’s shaking and swearing and Sam’s hands on his back, in his hair, are the only anchor.

Sam kisses the trail of freckles across Dean’s shoulders as they come down, tasting sweat and something darker. Dean tangles his fingers in Sam’s damp hair, moves his mouth away, but only enough to meet it with his own. They leave the pool table stained and the felt wrinkled, but otherwise unmolested, which is more than can be said for the rest of the place. They beat it out to the road, knocking into each other and laughing into the bright sunlight as distant sirens wail.

The car starts up, like always, and Sam smiles like a new beginning. Dean gives a war whoop and they peel out at a million miles an hour, leaving nothing behind for the police but a hanging veil of dust.

Inside, the guy goes cold, sticky red blood congealing on his lips.

This is what happens when you come back.

_Burning with fear and devotion and something darker and purer than lust or obsession, he ran across the long days and weeks and months, and was just in time to see his brother turn and wink one last time before he was swallowed up, down a hole and gone. In another moment he went down after, never once considering how in the world he was to get out again._

You don’t.

**Author's Note:**

> The italicized text is adapted from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll. Obviously no disrespect is meant to either the author or to his work; I have nothing but admiration for both.


End file.
